Moritz
Checking out the neighborhood
- Joined
- 4/19/24
- Messages
- 4
- Real Name
- Moritz Keller
Dear bird lovers,
My wife and I adopted two parrotlets from the animal shelter in November last year. They were found abandoned in a box in a trash can. We love them dearly and are delighted to provide them with a new home.
However, two things have proven to be quite challenging with these two stubborn little ones, likely due to their age and sad past: healthy eating habits and taming. Since healthy eating is more important to us, I'll start by asking about their diet.
Merlin and Tori have not touched anything but seeds since their arrival. We are well aware that this is not healthy. Here's what we've tried so far:
Do you have any ideas?
My wife and I adopted two parrotlets from the animal shelter in November last year. They were found abandoned in a box in a trash can. We love them dearly and are delighted to provide them with a new home.
However, two things have proven to be quite challenging with these two stubborn little ones, likely due to their age and sad past: healthy eating habits and taming. Since healthy eating is more important to us, I'll start by asking about their diet.
Merlin and Tori have not touched anything but seeds since their arrival. We are well aware that this is not healthy. Here's what we've tried so far:
- Offering various fruits and vegetables: apples, bananas, pomegranate seeds, kiwi, lettuce, broccoli, carrots, etc.
- Offering only fruits/vegetables in the morning: we even tried this until late afternoon (which we wouldn't usually do for fear of them starving), but they didn't touch any of the food.
- Mixing grated carrots/apples with seeds: They expertly pick out the seeds. Some carrot does stick to their beak, but as soon as we offer carrots without seeds for a day, they won't touch it.
- Offering fruits/vegetables in different sizes and shapes, hanging, on the ground, or in a bowl.
- Trying the food in front of them ourselves.
- Lastly, I had the idea of offering seeds only outside the cage and only offering fruit inside. They have almost the entire day to fly around the room but are only active when they are searching for food. My idea was that although they could get seeds, they would at least have some movement and might be more likely to go for the fruit if they were too lazy to move. The result: They didn't touch any of the fruit, were very loud all day, fought a lot (which is very rare for them), flew outside, and couldn't find their beloved seeds. Instead, they caused a lot of damage to the wallpaper. We tried this for a few days, but had to give up because otherwise they would have destroyed the entire room in a week.
Do you have any ideas?
